Calling Evil Good
“In a large city some very creative crooks broke in to a department store. They entered the store unnoticed and stayed long enough to accomplish their mission. You may wonder what they stole, but that’s just the catch. They didn’t take anything. Instead, these thieves switched the price tags. The tag on a $395.00 camera was removed and placed on a box of stationery. The $5.95 sticker off a paperback book was attached to an outboard motor. Everything was shuffled. When the store opened the next morning, you would have expected total chaos. Surprisingly though, the store operated normally at first. Some customers literally got some steals while others felt the merchandise was overpriced. Incredibly, four hours slipped by before the hoax was discovered.”
This evening I want to look at a story that I think is familiar to all of us. It takes us way back to the beginning. And from this we’ll see that the big issues we face today are not new, but they have been around since the beginning of time. And, indeed, they have been plaguing humanity from the beginning of time.
In God’s creation of the world, we see the statements in Genesis 1 that God saw that it was “good.” Hebrew (tov) (Gen. 1:4,10,12,18,21,25). Then in verse 31, he says that it was “very good” or “excellent.” Hebrew (tov m’oth). Here God is making a statement about creation. He is saying that his creation is good. Now, good we know describes an ethical or a moral quality. It describes value. It also describes the lack or opposite of evil. While the fact that God called creation good is of itself significant, I want to draw attention not the goodness itself, but to the fact that it was God who was making this judgment. It was God who decided that the creation was good.
Then in Genesis 2:16,17, it says, 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." Hebrew (tov)
God introduced the first rule to mankind. And here we may say many things, but again this is not my focus. Just notice, based on the fact that they are going to die if they eat from this tree, that this tree is not good for them. Whatever we can say about this tree, it is not good for food.
Now we go to chapter three, the moment of crisis. The serpent came to tempt Eve into eating the fruit, and then giving some to Adam. There are a lot of elements we could look at here, but I only want to look at Eve’s statement for now. She had the command of God not to eat the fruit. She knew because she told the serpent about it. She had the Word from God telling her that this fruit was not good for her, because it would cause death.
But in Genesis 3:6, we see Eve’s response to the serpent’s temptation, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for wisdom, she took some and she ate it.” Hebrew (tov).
Up until this point, only God had made judgments about whether something was good or not good. God say that creation was good or very good. In 2:18, it was God who said that it was not good for man to be alone. And in Gen 2:16,17, when giving the command about the tree, God calls it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Again, the word used here is the simple word for good and the simple word for evil. The same word tov/good that has been used throughout the story, is used here.
Can this not be a clue as to what the danger of this tree is. Up until this point, God made the assessment of what was good and what was not good. Mankind did not have any need to know good and evil, because this sort of judgment is not his place. Indeed, sometimes I’ve struggled with trying to understand what is so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil. How can we avoid evil if we don’t know what it is? How can we do good if we don’t know what it is? Surely, it is not that God wants us to be ignorant. But what this tree did, was cause mankind to forget God’s assessment of what is good and what is evil, and try to make his own assessment. It takes mankind from hearing the voice of God and obeying it, to looking around and making a determination for himself.
Eve made the first assessment of something’s value, not only apart from the Word of God, but contrary to the Word of God. She assessed, by looking, that the tree was “good” for food. But she was deadly wrong. Eating from that tree was the worst thing she could ever have done for herself. It led directly to the judgment of God that follows later in the passage. And as we know it led to the curse that still 6,000 or so years later plagues the earth.
As if to make sure that we don’t overlook this point, Eve is not the only one in the beginning of Genesis that makes this mistake. Go with me please to
Genesis 6:1-3, GE 6:1 When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
Here in the English, we have the translation that the daughters of men were “beautiful.” In the Vietnamese it’s “satisfactory in every respect.” But here in the original, we have once again the simple word, tov, good. Now, this passage is one of the frequently argued passages in the Old Testament. Who were the sons of God? Who were the daughters of men? What was the sin? But at least for now, we can overlook some of these questions and get right to the heart of the matter. What did these “sons of God” do that was so bad? Once again they made a judgment. They made a judgment about whether something was “good” or not good. And once again, they made this judgment based upon their sight, instead of based upon the Word of God.
MK 10:18 "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone.
And even GE 6:5 The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
God’s assessment of mankind is “no one is good” and that man is only evil all the time. But the sons of God in this passage were not interested in God’s assessment. Maybe they had the Word of God like Eve did and maybe they didn’t have the specific Word of God yet, but the fact is that the assessment they made based on their own sight was wrong. Here, even after consuming the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, mankind is no more capable of telling the difference between good and evil than he ever was. He is just as much a desperate failure as before. And the reason for this is simple. The assessment of goodness is left to God and God alone. For only God is able to accurately make that judgment. When we try to assess things ourselves, we end up mixing up the values, just like the thieves did in the department store. We end up calling the expensive or good things cheap or evil. And we call the cheap or evil things good.
Isaiah addressed this issue in 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Once again, we have the same Hebrew word for “good” here. (tov)
Our society has had a tendency to do this for many years and now I fear that it’s beginning to creep into the church. Our society says that what is right and wrong is up to you. What is good for you may not necessarily be good for me. And what is bad for you, might not necessarily be bad for me. But this is a lie. This is the same lie that caused Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. This is the same lie that brought the judgment of God on the sons of God in Gen. 6. This is the same lie that brought judgment on Israel in the days of Isaiah. And this is the same lie that will bring judgment upon us if we buy into it.
Now, I don’t know many Christians who would make the same statements as the world that morality is relative. But we must be careful that while we’re fighting against moral relativism on the front side, that it’s not creeping in through the back door. You see, just like Eve had the Word of God, which told her that the tree was not good for her, we also have the Word of God. We have the Bible, the Word of God, which clearly tells us what is good and what is evil. God, knowing that were incapable of properly assessing goodness, laid it out for us.
The Bible lays out the way that we should live. It lays out the types of things we should do and shouldn’t do. But it seems that sometimes we want to come to the Bible as just a guidebook. When we have a decision to make, we use the Bible as a reference point to try to make a good decision. We use the Bible as a reference point, from which we decide what is best for us. But this goes against the very nature of the Bible. The very reason for God giving us his Word is that he knows that our judgment is faulty. He knows that if the judging is left up to us, we will make the wrong choice every time. He knows that we will end up calling good evil and evil good. So he has laid out the answers for us. He has told us what is good and what is evil, so we don’t have to rely on our own faulty judgment.
The first word of Isaiah 5:20 packs a lot of meaning. It’s a simple word, “woe” and yet it says so much. This listening to God’s Word. This not mixing up good and evil, it is a very important thing. It is so important that Isaiah says “woe” to those who don’t listen. Woe to those who make this wrong judgment. And what is this word “woe.” This word describes more than just coincidental misfortune. This woe that is going to occur for those who mix up good and evil is not just that things won’t work out. It’s not just saying that because what you did wasn’t good for you, there will be some natural consequence. That may be true. When we do harmful things, there are often natural consequences. But when “woe to those who…” is used in the Old Testament it means one thing. It means the judgment of God is coming. It is an introduction to the judgment of God. The woe that comes to the one makes a wrong judgment about good and evil is nothing less than the direct judgment and fury of God. When we refuse to hearken to the Word of God, and insist upon making our own judgments of what is right and wrong, then we are inviting the wrath of God into our lives.
The Bible is not a book full of suggestions. I recently read a book where the author tried to persuade the reader that once we determine what the Bible is saying, we then need to evaluate that statement to see if we agree with it or not. This person advocated determining the validity of the Bible based on our own personal experiences. And theoretically speaking, I hope that everyone in this room would disagree adamantly with this guy. But in practice don’t we often do the same thing. We read the Bible as if it’s supposed to give us some suggestions. And if we read something and we think, “oh that seems like a good idea” then we do it. But when we read something that we don’t think will be beneficial to us we just ignore it. Or maybe we question it. We start to wonder why we have to do this thing. Or why we can’t do this thing. And until we get our answer, we don’t do it. But the Bible is not a suggestion book. We don’t have to understand the reason behind God’s commands to obey them. We don’t have to know why something is good or something is evil in order to obey it. In fact, that’s the whole reason that God has told us—he knows that we are unable to properly differentiate between good and evil. I think it’s okay to ask God questions. It’s okay to try to understand things. But we cross the line when we refuse to adhere to God’s word until we completely understand it. Do you think Eve knew why she wasn’t allowed to eat from the forbidden tree? She only knew one thing about that tree. God said not to eat of it or she would die. And that should have been enough information for her to run as far away from that tree as she could. That should have been enough, that God said it was not good for her, to keep her away. But it was her distrust of God and his Word that led her to eat of that forbidden tree.
This brings us back to the Garden of Eden, and back to what is the biggest element of obeying God’s standards of good and evil, whether we understand them or not. That element is faith or trust.
Romans 10:17 says, “17 Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.”
Faith comes from one thing, and that is hearing the Word of God. Eve heard the Word of God. She had the Word from God that said, “Do not eat of this tree.” She heard his voice. But she also heard another voice. And that was the voice of the serpent. And in the beginning of chapter 3, the serpent begins to make Eve doubt the Word of God. He begins to make her doubt even the very character of God. Instead of God making this judgment of good and evil for her, now she perceives it as God manipulating her for his own benefit. She listened to the voice of the “craftiest of all the creatures” instead of listening to the voice of the God who had lovingly created her. She allowed herself to doubt God’s words. See for her, it was no longer a decision of did God say it or not. She knew he did. It wasn’t even a choice of would she obey God or not, at least not in her mind. It wasn’t even a question of whether God knew what was best for her. She went even deeper to question whether God even wanted what was best for her. In God’s judgment of Adam, we see that he is guilty of the same thing.
Genesis 3:17a, “To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you… “
Was it a sin for Adam to listen to his wife? No. If she had said, “Don’t eat from this tree,” then of course he should have listened to her. The emphasis here is that Adam listened to the voice of his wife, instead of listening to the voice of God. This was the tree “about which I commanded you.” He had the Word of God. And even though we don’t know just how he got from the point of trusting in that Word to trusting in the Word of his wife, we know that he got there. Adam, like Eve, chose to listen a voice that did not know, instead of the One Voice who knew.
And we have voices all around us. We have people who whisper all kinds of Satan’s ideas in our ears. Our very society is so turned against God that just in living here we are bombarded with messages that are contrary to God’s Word. I don’t want to get into too many specific examples, because I could go on indefinitely. But when our children go to school, they’re taught that God didn’t create the world, but it just happened by chance. They’re taught that being gay is perfectly normal. They’re taught through safe sex appeals that it’s okay for them to be sexually active before marriage. And they have a choice whether to believe those things, even though they disagree with the Word of God, or to believe the Word of God. I’ll tell you, when I was in high school, I didn’t have all the answers to refute evolution. I know a lot more now than I did then, but at that time, I knew very little that would help me. It came down to a choice. It was a choice of whether I would believe my science teacher or my God. Even when it seemed like what my science teacher said made perfect sense, I had to choose to believe my God, who sometimes it seemed made no sense at all.
The Bible has a message of morality that we in the Church have done a good job of preserving, at least in theory. But the fact is, that the Bible has a very strong ethical message too. God is very concerned about how we treat other people. God is very concerned when we take advantage of someone, gaining at their expense. But what does the voice of our society say? The voice of our society says, “That’s the way business is done.” Everybody does it. We’re just trying to feed our families. We’re willing to overlook something that we know God’s Word says is wrong, because it doesn’t seem to work in real life. The list could go on and on. We hear voices about faithfulness to spouses and families, how to raise kids, how to be successful, and a host of other things. And more often than not, the messages we hear conflict with what the Bible says. The trouble is that many times these messages make sense to us. Many times, we hear voices that sound like friendly voices. But these voices have only one aim. Their only goal is like the serpent in the Garden, to discredit the Voice and the Word of God. Trusting in God is listening to the Word of God, and obeying the Word of God, even when all around us we hear messages that it isn’t true.
Another mistake that Eve made is the reason that I think we are so often willing to listen to these other voices instead of the Voice of God.
I think we are all familiar with Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
While the writer of Hebrews wrote this definition of faith so well much later, this concept was around from the very beginning. This idea of faith being contrasted with sight is around right in the book of Genesis. You see, Eve didn’t just hear the voice of the serpent and decide that the fruit was good. She didn’t reason in her mind and conclude that the fruit was good. And she certainly didn’t believe that the fruit was good. But as verse 6 says, she SAW that the fruit was good. Eve looked at the fruit. And the fruit looked good to her eyes. Again, in the passage were looking at in Genesis 6, the sons of God “saw” that the daughters of men were good. Here we have a contrast again. The Word of God says the fruit is not good. But now not only does the voice say that the fruit is good, but the sight says that the fruit is good. Naturally, if God didn’t want us to look at the things, he wouldn’t have given us eyes. Indeed, if he didn’t want us to appreciate beauty, he wouldn’t have made creation so beautiful. But here the sight I think refers to the senses or the physical senses. That is to say that the “unseen” is the spiritual. Faith is a spiritual thing.
But we, like Eve, have a choice. Will be believe and trust in the God and His Word that we cannot see, or will we trust in what our senses tell us. You see, the purpose of the voices is to get us to look. The voices that contradict God’s Voice get us to look at our circumstances. They may get us to look at our circumstances and evaluate God’s Word in light of our circumstances. So, we may look at something the Bible says and think that it’s a good suggestion and may even be possible in an ideal world, but it just doesn’t work in your real world.
But the simple message that I come with today is that the Word of God does work. If we haven’t seen evidence of that, maybe it’s because we are leaving out significant portions. Let me give you an example. What if I teach you how to fish. First you tie the hook. Then you put the worm on the line. Then you throw the line in the water. Then when you feel a tug, you jerk the line. Then you reel in the line. Then you enjoy your fish for dinner. And you read my list, and say, “Well these are nice suggestions, but I really don’t want to kill a poor worm.” So you just skip that one step. Well, you’re not going to catch any fish. Or if you don’t know how to tie a knot, so you just sort of hang the hook on the end of the string, you’re going to lose the hook and you’re not going to catch any fish. Or if you get a bite, but you say, “You know I really don’t think I should reel this in.” You’re not going to get a fish. In order for this plan to work, you have to follow all the steps. The Word of God is like that. It works. It really does. It’s not just some theoretical theology. It’s not just something for us to study, so we can feel smart. It works. BUT. But, we have to do it. If we don’t obey God, it won’t work. If we start to second-guess God and decide which parts we’ll obey and which parts just aren’t for us, it won’t work. If we start to listen to voices around us that tell us which parts we can’t really be expected to do. If we start to look at the circumstances of our life and determining which parts of God’s Word will fit and which won’t, then it’s not going to work.
The life lived in light of the Scripture is the life that works. But the life lived in light of God’s Word is first and foremost, a life of faith. Before you can approach any of the individual mandates of Scripture in a meaningful way, you must first take the leap of faith, to trust the God of the Word. You must place your life in his hands, knowing that he knows better than you what is good and evil. And when you ignore the voices and the sights around you, you won’t mix up good and evil, for God has already laid it out for you. The life of trust doesn’t allow for selective obedience. It’s all or nothing. Let’s give ourselves to following ALL of God’s Word. And then we will see that we will inherit ALL of God’s promises.
